Oprah's 3-ring Psychic Circus

What's your frequency, baby?

February 16, 2007. Yesterday,
ringmistress Oprah featured
alleged medium
John Edward in one ring, alleged psychic
detective and medium
Allison DuBois in
another, and paranormal investigator Dean Radin
in the third ring. The only skeptic in the audience, apparently, was a woman
who was identified as "skeptic woman" and "science lady." [Her real
name, Laura McMahon, was never used by Oprah, even though she was invited to
be on the program.] Oprah wanted to know why the "science lady"
didn't believe. Mrs. McMahon said, in effect, that she
didn't believe because there were no peer reviewed scientific studies
supporting belief in the paranormal. Oprah didn't ask any follow-up
questions like "Well, how do you think these clowns perform so unbelievably
well on my show, if they're not using psychic powers to connect to another
dimension? Do you think they're pulling a con? doing a cold reading or
something like that?" Instead, Dean Radin responded by asserting that the
skeptic
was wrong. In fact, he said, there have been over one thousand peer reviewed
articles published in such journals as Science and Nature.
Radin knows that only a few articles not disparaging the paranormal have
appeared in those journals. The rest appear in journals like the Journal
of Scientific Exploration, The Journal of Parapsychology, or The
Noetic Journal. (Here's a review of a
typical example of these studies.) Most scientists, he continued, don't know about them. Interesting. Let's ask
a multiple choice question.

Most scientists don't know about the
many peer reviewed articles in scientific journals that prove there is some
paranormal ability because

(a) Scientists don't read
scientific journals.
(b) There is a vast conspiracy to keep these articles out of the hands of
scientists.
(c) Scientists really do know about these articles but pretend not to so
that they don't have to deal with cognitive dissonance.
(d) Radin's claim is misleading because almost all of these articles are
published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration or other journals
that specialize in stuff mainstream scientific journals won't touch.
(e) The scientists who need to know about these articles do know about them
and they consider them of little value.

Knowledgeable people might think that (d) and (e) are
both correct. However, the best answer is that Radin doesn't mean by
"psychic" or "paranormal" what most people mean by it. When Radin speaks or
writes about psychic phenomena, he means an anomalous process of information
or energy transfer that is (a) currently unexplained in terms of known
physical or biological mechanisms and (b) is identified by statistical
analysis of data, especially
meta-analysis.

Oprah showed clips of Edward and DuBois doing readings
for people who have lost loved ones (known as "sitters" in the trade). She
then interviewed some of the sitters and all but one asserted that he or she
believed the medium made contact with spirits of people they had known when
they were alive. (One person said that Edward got nothing from the spirit
world in her reading. As expected, Oprah and others counted this not as a
failure to communicate but as more proof that Edward is not conning them.)
From what I have read by Dean Radin and from what I have heard in interviews
he has done, I doubt that he would have validated the demonstrations by
Edward and DuBois the way
Gary Schwartz
validated both of them in his lab at the University of Arizona. Radin is a
much more cautious investigator than Schwartz and has a much better sense of
what kinds of controls a scientific experiment requires. I think Radin would
have sympathized with those who lost loved ones, as would I, but he would
have recognized that they were strongly motivated to help their mediums
succeed and their
subjective validation of the readings is not strong scientific evidence
for the paranormal or the supernatural. Radin would have noted the selective
nature of the TV presentation of the readings—we don't know what was edited
out—and the subjective nature of evaluation used in these demos. For
example, Edward threw out the common name "Ann" in at least two of the
readings and both times the sitters found significance there.

When asked by Oprah why the dead don't speak plain
English and just say "This is your aunt Mary McGillacutty," Edward had an
answer. Spirits are at a "high frequency" and we are at a "low frequency."
He prays and meditates, which allows him to approach a gap between the high
and low frequencies where the garbled messages are picked up as "feelings"
by him. Sounds right to me! How he knows this was not discussed.
Oprah was very polite and even offered support for Edward's theological
musings by noting that ultimately we're all just vibrational energies, as
was shown in "The
Secret," another Oprah special interest. (In "The Secret" you learn
about Universal Laws such as the "law
of attraction" and other laws never studied by Dean Radin or any of the
thousands of scientists who publish in peer reviewed journals like
Nature,The Noetic Journal, or the Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research.)

DuBois was able to hoodwink Oprah into thinking she
really is a psychic detective like the kind you see on Court TV or on
"Medium," the show allegedly based on her real-life escapades. DuBois did
reveal just how low her standards are when she told Oprah's audience that
she was first validated as a psychic when she did three cold crime readings
and sent her reports to three police departments. One cop in Texas responded
in a letter that claimed she had revealed things in her report that had not
been revealed to the public. That was it. DuBois says she now knew she was
the real thing. DuBois has turned such anecdotes into tales of helping the
Texas Rangers and other such things, but finding police departments that
will say she has done anything of value for them has proved difficult.
Ben Radford investigated her claims about helping
the Glendale, Arizona, police and the Texas Rangers and found that both deny
ever working with her.

As is often the case with alleged psychic detectives, DuBois
and Edward were allowed to
provide most of the evidence supporting their claims about the origins of
their powers and about their talents. Nobody was contacted to
verify that their claims are true. Not being challenged, their stories appear
more solid than they would if anyone investigated them. The only evidence
provided for their alleged psychic abilities were the readings—cold
or hot, we have no way of knowing— they
were shown doing on edited video clips and the subjective validation given
to the readings by the grieving sitters.

DuBois made some claims about the body of Jackie Hartman,
who is believed to have been murdered
while out on a date. The body will be found within two weeks, she said.
(She was right about this but she wasn't really going out on a limb here.
That the murderer disposed of her bloody clothes in a dumpster indicates the
crime was not thought out. The body was probably hastily disposed of, too.)
DuBois said she was confident of this because, "I was shown a funeral and Jackie
being laid to rest so she will be found and the parents will have that."
(Too bad she wasn't shown somebody on an ATV*
finding the body.*)
She also said that the case involved a "date rape gone wrong" and a Hibachi
barbeque. Don't expect any follow-up. (The police had good reason
to believe Hartman was murdered, even before her body was discovered on
February 18th. On
January 29th, her torn shirt, soaked in blood and shot through with bullet
holes, was recovered. Her date, Jonathan Burns, was arrested.*
)

DuBois did claim in a
vague way that one woman was not murdered but had committed suicide. She did
not say the woman committed suicide; she said she got some sort of feeling
toward herself and then put her hands in front of her gut and pulled in as
if that was supposed to mean something important. When the woman's sister
verified that the police had ruled it a suicide, DuBois seemed validated.
She was also validated when doing a reading where she started with the head
as a place she was getting some sort of feeling. Lucky for her, the person
died of a head injury (she was on a bike when hit by a car). The deceased's
husband took this as evidence his wife was communicating to him. What he
probably doesn't know is that if she had gotten no feedback with the head, she
would have moved to some other part of her body, probably the chest area. And so
it goes.

DuBois lives in the Phoenix area and I think it is very
telling of how important she is to law enforcement by noting that when two
serial killers were murdering, shooting, raping, and robbing people for over
a year in her hometown, she wasn't called in and didn't provide any leads,
unless she provided one of the 2,000 anonymous tips that came in. Eleven
people were murdered and sixteen were wounded during the crime sprees that
began in May 2005. Two men were arrested for these crimes in August 2006 and
no mention was made of DuBois or any other alleged psychic helping the
police decide who to arrest.

A few months ago, Oprah did a
show on critical
thinking. She indicated that she'd like to see more of it in this
country. I wrote about that episode:

Oprah Winfrey is the master of the good story, the
anecdote that substitutes for serious analysis. In less than an hour, she
can turn a minor tale of something like
"road rage" into a candidate for admission into the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

She is an entertainer, not an educator, and we shouldn't
expect too much from her by way of enhancing whatever critical thinking is
already going on by viewers of entertainment programs that feature people
with paranormal or supernatural powers. Still, it would be nice if she did a
follow-up program with some knowledgeable people who could clearly explain
things like wishful thinking,
deception, subjective validation, hot
and cold reading, and the search for
anomalous statistics
as evidence of pathology not wisdom. She could educate herself and millions
of others in the bargain. It could even be entertaining. But don't hold your
breath. Oprah's website has a place where you can express
your
beliefs about the paranormal and the supernatural. You can even view the
results (so far). Not surprisingly, almost all visitors to her website
believe in both the paranormal and the supernatural. Only 5.8% are skeptical
of the claim that mediums get messages from the
dead. One of the related links listed on Oprah's web page for the "Do You
Believe?" show takes you to a story about some people who are wiped off the
road by an avalanche that totals their vehicle. They don't credit a higher
power with knocking them off the road and destroying their car, but they do
give a higher power credit for their survival of the crash. "There's
definitely a greater power out there looking out for us," mused one of the
survivors. Indeed; that higher power is called television producers looking
for people to exploit. Not that the executives have to twist anybody's arm
to get them to praise the Lord for not killing them when he sent tons of
snow down the hill to blow them off the road.

Also on her website is a message inviting us to stay tuned because she
is going to have medium
Lisa Williams
visit her studio and "diagnose" it for ghosts. That should be entertaining
and raise the level of discourse about critical thinking several notches.